Wednesday, December 28, 2016

As I sit here surrounded by books, working and writing, I can't help but think back just a couple years ago, when I started amassing e-books. I purchased both a Kindle and a Nook reader, set up a Google Books account too. I was converted: I moved my reading into the 21st century. Now? I have become a backslider, as evidenced by this photo. Why have I fallen from the faithful? It's really not very complicated at all.

When I started my doctoral degree, I tried to purchase e-books as much as possible, often from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Google Books, and iBooks, mainly because some titles were not always available as an e-book from one of the publishers. There were even quite a number of books not available as e-books at all. It was toward the middle of the program that I discovered that there just wasn't a way to replace being able to hold the book in my hand, take a pencil and underline and then write notes in the margins. All of the e-books readers offer the ability to highlight and make notes, but being able to do this in pencil just seemed to help me wrestle with the texts, and those who have worked on doctoral degrees know that there is a great deal of "text-wrestling" to be done. I could thumb back through the pages I marked up to quickly retrieve a note or an idea that I had during my original reading.

Still, I am not sure I have a totally rational reason for my almost-complete move back to e-books unless it as the current state of my study shows: I can stack the books around and see simultaneously, in one glance, where I've textually been and where I am going.

A few years ago I heard the chatter that physical books were going the way of 8-tracks, cassette tapes and vinyl records, but here it is about four or five years later, and the total demise of physical books has not yet occurred. What has occurred is the blunting of my enthusiasm for e-books. Sure, I still purchase them, especially if it's a title I would like to see immediately, but many times I have elected to the physical book instead. I even find myself thumbing through the new titles on Amazon's website to see if there are books I might want to pick up at the local bookstore. It turns out the failure of e-books to eradicate physical books wasn't enough, and it seems that vinyl records, 8-Tracks, and cassette tapes are coming back as well, though I have yet to long for those yet.

I've heard and keep hearing all these predictions about how this technology is going to revolutionize this industry, and how this device is going to make some old standard way of doings things obsolete, but it just doesn't seem to be happening with the same level of frequency anymore. In my case, I literally enjoy the comfort of being surrounded by books that I am reading. That's just not something they've figured out how to get out of Kindle app yet.

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John Robinson

English/Language Arts Teacher for 16 Years, School Level Administrator, BA English, MA Instructional Technology-Computers, MSA School Administration, EdS Educational Leadership. Ideas and opinions expressed here are my own and do not represent those of any organization to which I am associated.